“A Boy’s Life”
[***] (three stars)
Tonight at at 7:30 on HBO
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DESPITE their vast wealth, the Kennedy family doesn’t seem to have lost touch with regular people.
Maybe it’s because they’ve been through horrible public tragedy after horrible tragedy. Or maybe it’s because the family was weaned on public service. Maybe both.
Tonight, “A Boy’s Life,” a film by Rory Kennedy, daughter of Robert and Ethel, premieres on HBO. It probes the life of a young kid, Robert, who is the son of a teen mom.
Kennedy practically lived with this family in rural Mississippi for two years, chronicling the problems that 7-year-old Robert developed while living with his younger brother and grandmother, Anna Threadgill.
Despite conventional wisdom that says kids born to uneducated teen moms are better off living with their grandmothers, sometimes it just ain’t so.
Think about it – the grandmothers who raise their children’s children are usually the ones responsible for producing these underage children who have children in the first place. We watch as Robert – who clearly seems disturbed (extraordinarily hyperactive and incredibly volatile, scary for a little kid) – tries to break out of the bounds of his grandmother’s confinement.
At first granny seems the picture of love and kindness – after all, she’s the one who insisted on taking custody of the children of her obese, unemployed, toothless teen daughter. How could a girl like that care for children when she can’t even care for herself, right?
But we slowly see it’s granny who’s very disturbed, probably mentally ill. It’s granny who knowingly makes Robert believe he is mentally handicapped. In fact, he’s a perfect kid – a smart little boy who goes nuts only in his grandmother’s presence.
Little Robert, it turns out, is fighting for his very life – somehow knowing that Grandma will kill any shot he has at a normal life.
Kennedy’s basic idea when she first visited rural Europa, Miss., was to explore how social services deals with mentally disturbed children. What she discovered after filming them for so long was the opposite of what we all naturally assume. Maybe it’s even what she assumed.
While the first school he attends is a disaster, after he is transferred, it is the teachers, the principal and the social worker/M.D. in charge who in fact are the very ones who save Robert’s sanity, if not his life.